Tom Cruise Saved Tar Director Todd Field’s First Movie From Harvey ‘Scissorhands’ Weinstein
When Todd Field’s debut feature, “In the Bedroom,” premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, it was heralded as an instant American classic. Based on Andre Debus’ 1979 short story “Killings,” this tale of grief-stricken parents (Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson), who resolve to kill the murderer (William Mapother) of their only son (Nick Stahl) when they realize the man will be charged at most with accidental manslaughter, owes a great deal to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” and Wes Craven’s grindhouse riff “The Last House on the Left.” It is a film of quiet anguish, one that allows Spacek and Wilkinson to fully inhabit their devastated characters as they try to pick up the pieces. The constant presence of their child’s killer, who’s out on bail and hardly keeping a low profile around their small town, ultimately becomes too much to bear. Instead of tearing each other apart with long-simmering resentments, they decide to eliminate the source of their distress.
The key to the film’s effectiveness is its unhurried pace. Field is very much an actor’s director, but this doesn’t mean he indulges his talented cast’s every emotive whim. The grieving process is long and unpredictable, and it’s not just law enforcement’s failure to bring their boy’s killer to justice that’s eating away at the parents. It’s the “what ifs” of child-rearing, and the roads not taken that put them at each other’s throats and threaten to drive them apart.
“In the Bedroom” is a meticulously crafted drama that earns every single one of its 131 minutes. In terms of theatrical distribution, it’s a film that needs a true believer determined to back its director’s vision every step of the way. So when Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, who was notorious for re-cutting his acquisitions to heighten their commercial and awards appeal (and who will likely spend the rest of his life in prison after being convicted on two counts of sexual assault), won the Sundance bidding war to release Field’s movie, the filmmaker was distraught. He needed someone with juice in his corner. So he called up one of the biggest movie stars on the planet for emergency advice.
Tom Cruise Saved Tar Director Todd Field’s First Movie From Harvey ‘Scissorhands’ Weinstein
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